With just five weeks to go before the Sept. 15 deadline for relocating tens of thousands of military personnel mandated by the Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure Commission, all that state and local officials in Montgomery and Fairfax counties can tell worried commuters is that they’ll just have to find a different route to work. With most local roads already at or approaching gridlock, that’s not a helpful suggestion, it’s an indictment of County Executives Ike Leggett and Tony Griffin, the boards of supervisors they serve under, and state transportation officials who have failed to prepare for this major change in commuting patterns despite a five-year advance warning. When they find themselves stuck in miles-long traffic jams as thousands of additional cars attempt to squeeze onto already clogged roads, commuters’ wrath should also be directed at the ostrich-like “planning process” that came to the bird-brained conclusion that building sidewalks and bike paths near the new BRAC facilities was a far more important priority than widening the roads.
Montgomery County absurdly couldn’t complete a pedestrian tunnel connecting the National Naval Medical Center to the existing Metro station located across the street, so even if all 2,500 Walter Reed employees who are being transferred there take the overcrowded Red Line, the swarms of new workers will delay traffic even more when attempting to cross the street. Likewise in Fairfax County, where 19,000 federal workers will join the scrum on Interstate 395 in an attempt to get to Fort Belvoir and the Mark Center in Alexandria. It’s going to get very ugly.
Each year, politicians in Maryland and Virginia spend billions of taxpayer dollars on projects of far less urgency than making sure people can get to their jobs and homes in a timely fashion. The upcoming BRAC debacle is a textbook illustration of what happens when public officials spend so much time and energy catering to special-interest groups that they lose sight of their basic responsibilities to the public.
Instead of telling commuters to figure it out for themselves, immediate emergency measures are needed. Plans to widen affected arterials should be fast-tracked. Construction money should be diverted from less urgent projects. Cost-raising Project Labor Agreements should be torn up. So should expensive light-rail and streetcar projects when bus rapid transit service could be up and running in a fraction of the time. These BRAC Band-Aids won’t fix the deeper problem, but at least they’ll keep the local economy circulating until the next election.
